Kamala Harris has emerged as the favourite to take on Donald Trump in the US Presidential election later this year. The Vice-President has already been endorsed by Joe Biden, who announced on Sunday he would no longer seek re-election after a series of gaffes raised concerns about his health.
It already promises to be one of the bitterest elections in American history with the assassination attempt on Trump, 78, earlier this month shocking the world. Harris, who at 59 is nearly 20 years younger than her potential Republican rival, is the early favourite to be the Democrat pick and is already working to secure the nomination.
If she were to run, it would mean two Americans of Scottish descent battling for the keys to the White House. Trump’s mother was famously from the Isle of Lewis and the former reality TV star-turned-politician, who was the occupant of the Oval Office from 2017 to 2021, still holds great affection for the country.
Perhaps less well-known is the fact Harris has a famous Scottish ancestor. Her economist father, Donald J Harris, is said to be a descendant of Hamilton Brown, a plantation owner, slave owner and politician who lived much of his life in Jamaica.
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Although born in Ireland, Brown was born into an Ulster-Scots family in 1776. He acquired land on the Caribbean island and actually gave his name to Brown’s Town, originally Hamilton Town, after founding it in the first half of the 19th century.
He was a member of the House of Assembly of Jamaica for over 20 years and was a staunch defender of slavery, arguing slaves in Jamaica had better lives than the poor back home in Britain. He owned more than 1,000 slaves mainly concentrated in sugar plantations in Saint Ann Parish and received compensation when the British Government made slavery illegal in the colonies.
(Image: AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar.)
The government had to take a loan of £15 million to pay off slave owners – equivalent to £1.8bn today with the taxpayers picking up the tab until the debt was cleared in 2015. Brown himself was awarded £24,144 – the equivalent of £2.89m today. He died in 1843 and was buried in the Protestant graveyard at the St Mark’s Anglican Church he founded in Brown’s Town.
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In contrast, Harris was born in Oakland, California to Donald Harris, who was born in Brown’s Town, and the late Shyamala Gopalan, a Tamil Indian biologist. They divorced when Harris was young and she was predominately brought up by her mother, who died in 2009.
After college, Harris became a prosecutor to the surprise of her activist family. By 2003, she was running for her first political office, taking on the long-time San Francisco district attorney in a contest she would win. Barack Obama endorsed her in her 2010 race for California attorney general and she became a Senator in 2018.
She failed to win the presidential nomination in 2020 but Biden picked her as his running mate and her work has focused on bolstering her party’s coalition of women, young people and voters of colour. After Biden announced his intention not to run, she said: “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party — and unite our nation — to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.”
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